


Four Months

by socallmedaisy



Series: Fix Its and Fill Ins [9]
Category: Glee
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-14
Updated: 2012-07-14
Packaged: 2017-11-09 23:08:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/459500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/socallmedaisy/pseuds/socallmedaisy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Santana leaves for New York and leaves Brittany behind in Lima. Set post-season three finale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Santana

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted as two fics on tumblr, combined for your convenience.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's hard at first, in New York.

_four_

It’s hard at first, in New York.

She has her mom’s money, so it’s not like she’s living some starving artist existence, but she still talks her way into a job at a coffee shop two weeks after getting there and rents the tiniest apartment she can reasonably manage in, in an attempt to make it last. She has a bedroom and a bathroom, and a desk for her computer, and she makes sure there’s enough space left in the wardrobe, which is exactly half full of her clothes.

She looks at the empty half sometimes and feels a pang, and then she tugs at the bracelet on her wrist and reaches for her phone, or her computer, or presses a hand to her heart and counts how many days are left until she gets to see her again.

The only thing she splurges on are dance classes, an acting class she picks up on impulse, just because she sees the flier on the board, and a decent internet connection so she can be sure Skype will work without cutting out. 

She always picks up on the first ring, her smiling face shining out of the screen, and Santana leans closer, trying to remember the way she smells and the way she feels in her arms. She’s still not there, but at least she gets clear pictures of her four times a week, and she feels less guilty when she pays the bills and remember the way she smiles into the camera and shows her her school assignments, solid C pluses and B minuses marked carefully in the corners with red pen.

She pulls double shifts and goes to auditions, trying to get her foot in the door, and the first time she sees Rachel at this audition for a tiny off-off-off Broadway play she throws her arms around her and clings on for an embarrassingly long time, while Rachel laughs and asks her how she is. Neither of them get the part, but Santana takes her back to her coffee shop after and makes her a soy cinnamon latte, drinking her black coffee slowly and asking her about NYADA.

Santana doesn’t ask after him and Rachel doesn’t mention her name, but somehow they both hang between them anyway, lending everything this melancholy air that Santana has been trying to rid herself of, the same way you shake out a blanket and roll it away. Rachel stutters out a “How’s Br—” just before she leaves and then stops, surprised at herself and the sudden look on Santana’s face.

“Fine,” Santana says shortly, and knows that she’ll never ask again.

 

_three_

Everything makes Santana think of her. There’s this blonde girl who comes into the shop whenever she has a morning shift and always orders caramel lattes and smiles at her, easy and open, in a way that tugs at her heart. Santana just grunts at her and hands her the coffee carefully, so their fingers don’t touch, and ignores the confused look on the girl’s face.

Rachel comes around more and more, and it gets so Santana already has her coffee ready when she knows Rachel is on the way from her classes, and she doesn’t even question how Rachel Berry ended up the only familiar thing in her life, when everything else feels like it’s changing around her, unrecognisable and alien.

Cheerful Skype dates where they talk about their days turn into them staring at each other, red-eyed and silent, whimpering about how they miss each other and how none of this is fucking fair. Santana blames herself for not paying more attention, but it’s hard to notice things that are hidden so well and so far out of the realm of possibility that they don’t even occur to you in the first place.

She gets a part in the chorus of a tiny play that only runs for two nights, and Rachel comes opening night, sitting in the front row and beaming at her every time she dances into a spotlight. She doesn’t find out until afterwards, when they’re both four cocktails worse off in this bar near her apartment and Rachel is slurring in her ear and telling her to check her phone, but Rachel called her when the show started and kept the line open during the whole thing and when she looks there’s a message on her phone that says _you were amazing baby xxx_ and just the thought of her sitting at home on her bed listening to the show from Ohio makes her throat close up and her vision swim. 

She just sort of shuts down, ignoring the excitement of her castmates, until Rachel grabs her arm and ushers her out of the bar. She takes her back to her apartment—she has to ask her four times where she lives before Santana finally gives up the information in the back of the cab—and pulls her out of her clothes, ignoring Santana’s snappy comments about not being interested in her, before she thrusts some pajamas at her and pushes her towards her bed.

When she wakes up in the morning, Rachel is on her couch drinking black coffee with a grimace because she doesn’t have any soy milk, and she blinks at her sleepily when Rachel fixes her with this very determined look and asks her if she’s okay.

 

_two_

The weather gets cold in New York in November, which is something she hadn’t realised before, despite a lifetime of Ohio winters. Rachel starts visiting the shop bundled up in scarves and thick, padded coats, and it makes her think of the winter before, of building snowmen and rolling around in the snow, hot kisses cutting through the cold, and she grunts at Rachel and hands her her coffee without preamble when Rachel asks her how she is.

She goes and sees some exhibit show that NYADA puts on, and Rachel is phenomenal as usual, belting out the few solos she gets, much less than the old days in New Directions, and making the most of her time in the spotlight. It reminds her of Sectionals and Regionals and Nationals, and she doesn’t stick around much after it’s over, just congratulates Rachel and leaves, heading back to her apartment and her computer, hoping that she’ll answer when she calls.

New Directions win at Sectionals, she tells her over Skype, and Santana wishes she could have been there, but a plane ticket or a bus ticket or any way of getting home would eat into her money, and she has shifts at the coffee house that she can’t miss. In her lowest moments, when she gets rejected for another part, or screws up the steps in her dance class, or feels less than everyone else waiting to be called back, just another girl out of her league in the big city, she wishes she’d stayed in Lima with her, because at least at the end of the day there’d be arms welcoming her home and loving her, making her feel like she’s worth something no one else is, because she’s the only one who gets to bury her head in her shoulder and hold on for dear life.

But the thing is, none of this is really working out the way it was supposed to.

Rachel eventually says his name when they’re polishing off tequila shots in a dive bar near Rachel’s dorms, and Santana just stares at her because the way this worked is they were never supposed to mention either of them, or remind each other about where they came from, because it’s easier to just be in the city without dealing with all of that, and Santana stutters out something that sounds like, “I have to go home,” before Rachel grabs her arm.

“The truth is—” she says, shouting over whatever awful song is blasting out of the jukebox. “The truth is, I don’t miss Finn anymore.”

“The truth is I miss her every day,” Santana shouts back, in a rare moment of honesty, and she shrugs out of Rachel’s touch and heads for the door and a cab, trying to ignore the images of blonde hair flitting behind her eyelids.

 

_one_

She gets another part in the chorus in December, only this time she has a couple of lines as well, and even if there’s only like five people that come to the tiny theatre to see the play it’s something to put on her resume. The show runs through the holidays, preventing her from going home like she said she would, and she calls her mom and breaks the news quickly like she’s pulling off a bandaid, surprised when the only thing her mom says is that she’ll be missed, only it doesn’t sound like she means by her.

She talks to her three nights in a row before she tells her, and she can’t deal with the way blue eyes swim with tears, the way she presses her hand to her mouth like she’s trying to push the sobs back in and stop them from coming out. “That’s great that you got a part,” she says, only it sounds like something else and Santana nods furiously, hoping it’ll make everything better.

“I have lines,” Santana says, like that should make it worthwhile, and watches her nod, the same way she had a moment before.

When she calls the next day, Santana sends it to voicemail and then texts her later saying that she had to switch shifts and work late, just because she can’t stand to disappoint her again. Sam calls her the next day and asks what the hell she’s doing, and she even hangs up on him and then ignores him when he tries to call her back. She knows he’ll take care of her, and it’s better if they don’t miss her at all.

The coffee shop gets sort of crazy around the holidays because everyone suddenly wants cinnamon in their drinks and hot chocolate with marshmellows, and it takes twice as long to make all the orders, so by the end of her shift Santana would be quite happy if she never saw a stick of cinnamon ever again, and it’s only made worse when Rachel comes in for her cinnamon soy latte and grins at Santana in the same way that used to annoy her in high school while she watches her make it.

Rachel says that she just wanted to come by before she went home to Lima to see her dads and the thought that Rachel gets to go home when she doesn’t makes Santana ache in ways she doesn’t have words for her, because the idea that Rachel might be in the same place as her is so grossly unfair on so many levels. “There isn’t— You don’t have anything you want me to take home do you?” Rachel asks eventually, just as Santana’s pulling her apron off and coming to sit down next to her, and she stares for a long moment before she shakes her head and fiddles with the cardboard holder around her cup, wishing Rachel would stop looking at her like that.

 

_zero_

She works late on Christmas Eve because she’s the only one who doesn’t have anywhere else to go, and she closes up the shop alone, snuggling further into her coat and wrapping the scarf around her neck. She gets a cab home and swallows the extra charge wordlessly, just handing over the cash when the guy wishes her a merry Christmas and heads for her apartment building, not really paying attention to the shape sitting on her steps until she realises it’s person-shaped, and then looks again and realises it’s a kind of a familiar person shape too.

Santana’s heart tightens painfully in her chest, suddenly sure that she’s having some sort of hallucination right here on the steps to her building. The one thing she’s learnt in the last four months is that life isn’t some stupid romcom with a happy ending, and the idea that Bri— that she could be sitting on the steps just as snow starts to fall on Christmas Eve is so ludicrous that she actually stops and stares, wondering if maybe there was something in that last cup of coffee she drank.

“Hi,” the vision in front of her says, beaming that smile with that fucking fuzzy deerstalker hat pulled down low on her forehead, just the way she remembers her looking but even better because she’s actually here. “Your building is kind of scary at night” she says, and then she kisses her so hard that Santana forgets to breathe, her tongue pushing into her mouth clumsily, like she’s over-eager and anxious and forgotten what it feels like, cupping her face in mittened hands and wishing she never had to stop.


	2. Brittany

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The day Santana leaves is the worst.

_zero_

The day Santana leaves is the worst.

She curls up in her room with Lord Tubbington and sinks her fingers into his fur, clutching tightly until he turns to look at her kind of like he’s annoyed and she lets go, suddenly self-conscious even though there’s no-one there to see. He purrs a little and snuggles closer and she knows he’s not really mad, so she pulls him into her lap and keeps him close, just in case he tries to leave too.

It takes her what feels like forever to re-orientate herself to a Santana-less existence, because even when Santana would go on vacations with her parents during the summers she always knew she’d come back, and so it wasn’t hard to miss her for two weeks because she was just waiting until she filled her days again. Now she doesn’t know what’s waiting for. She keeps expecting Santana to be there and she just isn’t, not when she wakes up, or when she gets out of the shower, or when she goes downstairs to get cereal and expects her to be sitting at the counter with a bowl and a spoon for her, half of it already eaten.

Santana isn’t there in English and she isn’t there in Math, and even though she sits next to Sam which is kind of like sitting next to Santana but with less hand holding under the desk, she misses her. She pays attention and goes to all her classes, and with the work she did at summer school she’s not that many credits short of graduating now, especially since she skipped out on the Cheerios this year, just in case she managed to get her credits done before the cut off in December and wasn’t around for the second half of the year.

She doesn’t tell Santana. Again. She doesn’t know why, just knows she can’t disappoint her again or get her hopes up, just in case she falls flat on her face and messes up her second go round too. 

They Skype as much as they can, at all hours of the day depending on Santana’s shifts at the coffee shop, so sometimes Santana is blinking at her sleepily from behind her glasses in the mornings and sometimes she’s buzzed and wide awake after a late shift while Brittany needs to go to sleep. Santana tells her about how all the girls at the auditions she goes to are bitches, and how the subway freaks her out and she keeps getting lost, and Brittany listens to her and feels her breath catch in her throat because Santana may be a little fish in a big pond now but Brittany will always be the little fish in the little pond and that hurts just as much sometimes, especially without the big fish to hold you at night. Y’know, if fish could hug each other with their fins or whatever.

 

_one_

She pulls solid Bs in her English class even though she’s still not sure of the difference between a metaphor and a simile, and her teachers actually start smiling at her instead of looking through her like they did for so many years, even when Santana was there to glare at them. Sam gives her a hug every time they get an assignment back, and it’s not really the same as a hug from Santana but it’s an okay second place, and Artie starts calling her a smarty pants every time he sees her, which is nice even if she thinks he is mostly joking. 

She shows her mom the stack of papers and watches her smile like she’s so proud of her that she might burst from it, and she doesn’t even care that it’s kind of silly when her mom puts her sheet of quadratic equations next to her little sister’s times table quizzes on the fridge, both of them with matching Bs in the corner in red pen.

Santana gets her first part in the chorus, and even though it’s this tiny show and she doesn’t have any solo parts, she listens to the whole thing over Rachel’s phone, sitting cross legged on her bed and ignoring her sister hammering on her door, and thinks she can pick out Santana’s voice even though the chorus is all supposed to blend together. She can always pick out Santana’s voice, because she’s been training to do it her whole life, and she thinks how stupid it is that she’s expected just to blend in with everyone else when she should be out front and centre, stealing all the applause. She sends her a text message before she falls asleep that says how good she was, and squints at her screen, thinking that maybe her phone is broken because she doesn’t even get a reply when she wakes up.

She has a big Physics test that she and Tina and Artie study for together in every spare minute they have, and it feels like her brain is a sponge, soaking in all the information but then getting too full of it so that bits of things she’s supposed to remember just fall out. She forgets to pick her sister up from her gymnastics class, and she forgets to lend Sam her copy of the book they’re reading for English, but she can remember how to work out how fast something is going if she has the distance it’s travelled and the time it takes, and she wonders if she could walk to New York if given enough time, and how long it would take until she was in Santana’s arms again once she got there. She’s so busy trying to work it out that she forgets to talk to Santana even though she’s staring at her on the screen, and it takes her a while to realise she’s crying quietly, and then she wonders how long it would take her to get to New York if she ran instead.

 

_two_

She almost gets caught up in preparing for Sectionals and forgets to complete her assignments, the same way she had the year before, but she catches herself and makes sure she studies, because she only has two more English tests and a Maths test to take and she’s done all she can before she gets her results back and finds out if she has all the credits she needs.

She feels the same way she does when she’s dancing and her feet have just left the ground, that little moment of doubt between whether she’ll fall or the ground will be there to catch her, and even though she isn’t quite done with her tests she feels the ground rushing up to meet her, and wonders if the fall will hurt the same way it did at the end of the year before, even though she’d known that one had been coming.

She misses Santana at Sectionals, and even though Tina holds her hand while they wait on stage for the results, it’s not the same as Santana trembling next to her, and the hugs she gets don’t feel the same either, even when Artie says how it was her choreography that won it for them, and Sam picks her up and spins her around until she’s laughing, just sort of on the outside, without ever really feeling it in her lungs the way Santana always made her.

It gets cold, and even though she wears Santana’s old Cheerios jacket—the one thing Coach had let them keep—she still feels like her bones are freezing inside her and her limbs don’t quite work, because it isn’t the same without Santana’s arm tucked through hers and rubbing against her wrist, fingers searching for hers as they went from History to English to Math and back again. 

Santana talks about Rachel and the coffee shop and Brittany sees the sadness hiding behind the lenses in her glasses, even though she’s trying to hide it which she’s never been good at even when there’s miles between them and they’re looking at each other through computer screens, grainy and jumping every now and then. She tells Santana about Sectionals, but doesn’t mention how it wasn’t the same, and Santana asks her something about Regionals that Brittany is about to answer before she remembers that she doesn’t know if she’ll be there for Regionals, and then she gets quiet and just stares at Santana instead, watching her yawn and rub at her eyes behind her glasses and wishing she could cuddle her until she falls asleep.

Nothing’s the same without Santana, but it’s not long until winter break and Santana promised her she’d come home, and she has a chart on the wall counting up the days until she gets to see her again, because she promised herself she’d kiss her once for every day they missed and she needs to keep some sort of accurate record otherwise what was the point of making the promise in the first place?

 

_three_

Santana isn’t coming home for the holidays. She cries when she tells her, and Brittany feels the sobs crawling their way up her throat too as she tries to swallow them back down. Santana tells her how she has lines to go along with her chorus role this time, and Brittany nods because lines are important, especially the ones you cross without knowing, like how Santana doesn’t call her at all for three days and how she hangs up on Sam and hasn’t even spoken to Quinn, even though Brittany called her to ask. 

There’s a line in the sand as thin as a piece of paper between them, and she takes her last Math test without telling anyone, just heads to the choir room afterwards and sings Christmas carols with them, and nods along mutely when they wish her a happy holidays and say they’ll see her in January. Sam fixes her with a look and hugs her for longer than he should, and Brittany thinks she hears him mumble something into her hair about how he promised Santana he’d take care of her, but that Santana never told him how to take care of her if she was the one hurting her, and Brittany shakes her head and runs her fingers through his hair the way Santana used to until he smiles, because none of this was ever his fault or his mess to fix.

Ms Pillsbury calls when she’s been at home for a week, and Brittany takes a deep breath before she comes to the phone, trying to ignore the way her mom hovers in the doorway and looks at her anxiously, waiting to hear if she’s screwed everything up again.

She doesn’t hear anything after you passed because she hangs up the phone mid-sentence and dials Santana’s cell with shaking fingers, and she’s breathing so hard by the time she hears a voice on the end of the line that it takes her a minute to realise it isn’t Santana. Rachel tells her that Santana left her phone at her place the night before but that she’s on her way to take it back to her before she leaves to come home to Lima and asks if she can pass on a message, but Brittany shakes her head and then adds a no when she realises Rachel can’t see her.

She calls her back and asks her for Santana’s address ten minutes later, ignoring the way her mom looks at her, and wondering how close her savings will get her to New York and Santana, to hugs and kisses and all the things she’s missed more than she knows until this moment, wondering if there’s some equation for expressing the way her heart feels like it’s only half there when Santana isn’t. Like _Brittany - Santana = distance(heart/2)_ but she never learnt the kind of math that would let her work that out, so.

 

_four_

Rachel gives her instructions for the subway and tells her which stop to get off at, and she wonders if going to find Santana at the coffee shop would be too much of a cliche or not, like some kind of lame romantic comedy that Santana always hated, ever since they were young and Brittany had secretly wished that their lives would work out the way they did in the movies. 

She hopes she has the right apartment, and she checks the address Rachel gave her three times and she’s pretty sure she’s on the right street, so she sits down on the steps to wait after she presses the buzzer and no-one answers, blowing on her hands and tucking them into her pockets as the night gets colder around her.

She sees Santana almost fall out of the cab before Santana notices her, hears her grunt a happy holidays at the cab driver as she slams the door, and it’s almost too good to be true, that she’s real and Brittany could reach out and touch her if she wanted to without hitting the computer screen first.

“Hi,” she says and watches Santana’s jaw drop as she blinks at her in confusion, almost like she doesn’t even recognise her which is ridiculous because she’s her Brittany and she always will be, even if they lived their whole lives in separate states and never saw each other face to face again.

“New York is kind of scary at night,” she says, and then Santana’s hands are reaching for the ends of her scarf and using it to pull her towards her, until their lips meet and her brain shuts down, because there’s no use trying to figure out the equation anymore because she thinks her heart just snapped back together with its other half, and there’s no way math can get any better than that.


End file.
